Troubleshooting your Magento 2 website
Having some teething problems with your Magento 2 website? Maybe you’ve stumbled across some issues and haven’t got adequate experience or support to get your ecommerce website back on track. Never fear, Space 48 is here!
Space 48’s Technical Director and revered Magento Master, Tony Brown, is here to troubleshoot your Magento 2 ecommerce store. This quick-fire clinic outlines 10 top symptoms and remedies for addressing and solving (perceived) issues with your ecommerce website. Lie back and await your prognosis:
1. Has your team got the required training for Magento 2?
This might sound self-explanatory, but it can really hinder your performance if your team doesn’t have adequate Magento 2 training. It’s crucial to work with experienced Magento developers and have relevant members of your business fully trained on Magento 2, to ensure you get the best out of the platform.
2. Do you have security policies in place and procedures defined to roll out patches?
Have security measures been discussed? Is there a user policy in place? When patches arrive, does everyone understand the process? Be proactive rather than reactive. Who has access to the Magento 2 admin? Consider locking down your admin so that only appropriate people can access it and ensure IP is locked according to location.
3. Is your site performance and loading speed in line with set expectations?
Magento 2 can increase your page loading speeds by 50% compared with Magento 1 – see our Magento 2 performance comparison infographic – but these stats are based on vanilla Magento installations. Every customisation can impact your performance, so monitoring is crucial to set your expectations and highlight issues. Talking of monitoring…
4. Is monitoring in place and fully utilised on your ecommerce website?
Good visibility on ecommerce stores is key to maintaining continuity, accuracy and preempting potential issues that affect website performance and brand reputation. Be proactive and implement robust server monitoring. Set up alerts for application errors, increase your infrastructure and get ahead of issues before they escalate.
Are logs being aggregated and monitored? Multiple servers should be aggregated to a single location and access logs should be in a centralised place.
5. Is your site backup adequate and tested?
Backing up your ecommerce website is crucial to your operations. Have you got failover in place? Failover is a key component of disaster recovery and ensures the continuity of your service.
6. Has basic configuration been updated?
Make sure your tax details and store names, plus basic information like email names and addresses, transactional emails and locality, have all been updated. Also, avoid one of the common mistakes during replatforming – default copy! When themes are customised, default copy can be missed, only becoming evident when reaching the customer, which will frustrate customers and damage your brand reputation.
Make sure indexing is set to “Update on Schedule” as default, rather than “Update on Save”. For more info on indexing, check out our blog on common mistakes with Magento 2.
7. Are sitemaps configured correctly and set to auto-generate?
If not, get this sorted pronto! Not having auto-generated sitemaps can lead to SEO problems and confusion for your website visitors. Magento 2 enables automatic generation of sitemaps and can be set to generate daily, weekly or monthly. Go to the configuration settings in your Magento 2 backend and head to Catalog -> XML Sitemap -> Generation Settings.
8. Are you using the appropriate PHP version?
If you’re replatforming your ecommerce website and not updating your PHP to the appropriate upgrade for Magento 2 (i.e. PHP 7), you’ll run into performance and potential compatibility issues. It sounds straightforward, but compatibility on your platform is key to success with Magento 2.
9. Has SEO performance been considered and have the required redirects been set up?
SEO issues are inevitable during any platform migration, but if you follow best practices, you’ll avoid too much disruption. Implement preemptive measures and processes to ensure redirects are working, and broken links are minimised. Monitor your 404 pages and use this monitoring to prevent and fix SEO issues and improve customer experience.
10. Are you using the Google PageSpeed tool to check your frontend?
Have you checked your Magento store frontend with the Google PageSpeed tool to ensure the theme setup and infrastructure performance matches your expectations? Google PageSpeed will assess your page, providing a score along with recommendations for improvement. Customisations and modifications can cause page speed degradation over time. A minimal score of “good” is what you should aim for.
Summary
These key considerations and expert tips for preventing and addressing issues with your Magento 2 website will help you implement the right measures and processes to create a stable, high-performing ecommerce website to drive your business forward.
Register for our #EcommerceClinic webinar
Want to attend our ecommerce webinar on nurturing customers with personalisation? On August 31st, Space 48 ecommerce experts Stephen Elldred and Oliver Lees are joined by James White from Nosto, one of the world’s leading personalisation solutions. Register now for our #EcommerceClinic Webinar to get cutting-edge personalisation tactics from industry experts and submit your questions for this live Q&A session.
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Space 48 is a UK ecommerce agency, specialising in Magento development and ecommerce strategy. If you need more advice about your Magento 2 website or a technical audit, get in touch with our Magento ecommerce website developers and let us help you improve your website performance.
